Understanding the effects of gender, age, and cultural orientation on users' flow experience during the use of a gameful educational system

Gameful approaches (e.g., gamification, games, and alternate reality games) have been widely used in education in recent years. However, the results are still contradictory and generated different challenges. One of the main challenges is to understand how different individual aspects affect the users' experience in gameful educational systems. To face this challenge, in this paper, we present a study (N = 205) analyzing the effects of demographic aspects (i.e., age, gender, and cultural orientation) on users' flow experience (i.e., challenge-skill balance, action-awareness merging, clear goals, unambiguous feedback, concentration, sense of control, loss of self-consciousness, transformation of time, and autotelic experience) during the use of a gamified educational system. The main results indicated that age positively affected the overall flow experience while individualism negatively affected the overall flow experience. Our results contribute to the fields of educational technologies and gamification, providing insights into how different demographic aspects can affect the user flow experience in gamified educational systems.